"You used the Grail Brotherhood's network to store your electronic life-forms?" Nandi from the Circle asked. He seemed more bewildered than angry. "How could you have done anything so mad?"

"What do you expect from someone who thought he could play God?" said Bonnie Mae Simpkins in disgust.

"I have given the only justification I can," Sellars said. "And I admit it is a poor one. I had no idea of what the Grail Brotherhood was or what it intended, of course—the network was not labeled "For Evil Purposes Only." And I was not entirely sane in those days. But what happened next did much to sober me.

"Because of course, when I next looked in on the progress of the experiment, I found my evolutionary hothouse empty. The creatures, if I can give that name to things without bodies, things which existed only as representative numbers in a complex mathematical model, had vanished. In fact they had been adopted, but I had no way of knowing that at the time.

"In a panic, I reconfigured my Garden, my network of information-sifting gear, to monitor for any sign that the evolving creatures had escaped into the world grid. At the same time I began to study the people who owned the immense facilities from which I had purloined the small corner in which the data-creatures had been hidden, from which they had escaped . . . or been removed. From that point on, the story I told you back in Bolivar Atasco's world is the truth. I found out what the Grail Brotherhood was doing, or at least began to suspect. I saw that the secrecy and remoteness of their network was meant not to protect industrial secrets, but to hide something far larger and more bizarre. Slowly, I was drawn from the search for my own lost experiment into a genuine horror at the activities of the Grail Brotherhood—always linked to my own worry of what such ruthless people might do, even by accident, with my experimental creations. You know the rest of the tale. To a large extent, you are the rest of the tale."

"And so you've brought us here to gloat?" Nandi said,. He turned and jabbed a hand at the banks of glowing, cell-spaces in the rock walls. "Because clearly these are creations. I can guess what happened. The Other found them and kept them. It nurtured them, as it nurtured the almost-children it had made for itself." He shook his head in disgust. His voice softened, but there was a hardness in it that made Renie even more uncomfortable. "It does not matter that a horrible thing behaved that way because it was itself tortured. We can understand, but not excuse—'Love the sinner but hate the sin,' I believe my Christian comrades say. And even if this abomination around us was created out of something like love—although that, I think, does not describe your part in this, Sellars—that does not make it right. These . . . creatures . . . are the thing we in the Circle felt, the great wrongness. I understand that now. You want us to wonder and applaud, but I tell you instead that they must be destroyed."

To Renie's surprise, Sellars did not argue. "Your viewpoint deserves to be heard," he said. "That is why you are here. We have a terrible choice—no, you have a terrible choice, all of you. But not me. I have forfeited my right to decide."

"What are you talking about?" demanded Bonnie Mae Simpkins. "Forfeited? Decide what?"

"Just what Mr, Paradivash was speaking of," Sellars said with a sort of restrained courtesy. "He was correct. The Other found them, took them, nurtured them here within his own secret recesses. And now the Other's children have reached what he believed—or at least sensed—was a final evolutionary fitness. So desperate was he that they should live that I think he hung on in terrible agony and fear much longer than he would have wished.

"But in return for his help preserving this place, and thus preserving all of your lives, I promised the Other I would do my best to help his information-children survive his death." Nandi began to say something, but Sellars held up his hand. "I did not promise to protect them after that."

"Sophistry," Nandi scoffed.

Sellars shook his head. "Listen to me, please. This is important. The Other intended his children to have total freedom. At the moment they are contained in this internal system environment like eggs in a nest, but once they are born out into the network I think there will be no containment. They will inevitably find their way out into the larger net. They will live in it like fish in the ocean. Will they be hostile to us? I doubt it. Indifferent? Quite possibly, even likely. Since their needs will be noncorporeal, they will probably live in a sort of symbiotic relationship with us—no, not with us so much as with our technology, because that will be the medium in which they live." Sellars cleared his throat. He seemed embarrassed, even awkward.

He looks like his dog messed in our garden, Renie thought. When what he's really saying is, "Oops, I may just have set the human race up for extinction."

"But I must be honest, must point out all the possibilities," Sellars continued as if he had heard her unspoken fears. "Indifference or even symbiosis does not guarantee cosurvival. It could be they will grow far beyond us. It could be that whether they care about us or not, the day will come, as it has for many other species on this planet who shared our environment, when there is no longer room for both."

"Slow down," said T4b. "This blows up my head, me. Sayin' that these Christmas lights are alive? Gonna take over the planet? Six 'em, clear. Gotta six 'em."

"That seems to be the other alternative," Sellars admitted. "We have only minutes to make a decision. Or you do. As I said, I have brought this to be through my own foolishness and selfishness. I do not have the right to vote on their fate."

"Vote?" said Nandi. "What is there to vote on? You admit these things are a threat to all human life. They are a picture-perfect example of the results of human arrogance—of what happens when men try to take on the powers and privileges of God. Look at the Grail Brotherhood! They did the same thing and they reaped death as their reward. Yet you say we should vote on this matter, as though it were some . . . village dispute."

"Seen up close, democracy is a dreadful thing," quoted Florimel sourly. "Who said that? Oh, yes, Jongleur. Before he was exploded into free-floating molecules."

"This is not an argument about the worth of democracy," Nandi protested. "This is an argument about applying schoolbook civics to the fate of the Earth!"

"No, the fate of humanity," said Martine quietly. "They are not the same thing at all." Renie doubted if anyone else heard her.

"I realize it is not an easy question," Sellars began. "That is why. . . ."

"I feel them!" Nemesis began pacing up and down beside one wall of lights. Renie thought he looked like a caricature of an expectant father—a stunningly peculiar expectant father, at that. Why the hell is that thing so excited? she wondered, even as she felt her skin tightening with anxiety. The lights did seem to have changed, as though some low-level pulse now made their glow less steady. What's his interest in this whole thing?

Before she could ask about this small but unexplained detail, another figure suddenly appeared from out of nowhere at the center of the gathering.

"I am so sorry I could wait no longer," Hideki Kunohara said to Sellars. Renie was not the only one to gasp in surprise, Kunohara wore a formal black kimono and a slightly loopy smile. "I was listening in on your discussion, trying to be patient until my turn came, but I feared I might miss this spectacular event."

"But . . . you're dead!" a shocked Florimel pointed out. "Your house collapsed."

"They are not the same thing at all," Kunohara said cheerfully, and winked at Martine. "And the loss of my house served your purpose, did it not? You and your friends made your escape, didn't you? So perhaps something more like gratitude is in order." He paused, then made a swift little bow to Florimel. "Forgive me. I do not mean to be insulting. I am pleased to see you survived. It is just that time is short." He turned to survey the rows of lights, his expression exalted, almost feverish. "Wonderful! Any biologist in the world would trade ten years of his or her life to be present for this!" He paused, suddenly angry. "Take a vote about whether to let it happen or not? Madness." He looked critically at Sellars. "Would you really agree to such a stupid exercise?"